Hostage Situation

Part Seven

Recollection would paint the situation in fragments, her consciousness focusing on one detail as the rest of it blurred.

The doorjamb was flimsy office construction, nothing more than plaster and light wood. It gave easily beneath the force exerted by the booted heel of a two hundred and fifty pound Jaffa. The splinters hurtled outwards, chunks of plaster spiralling off like little asteroids and sending up a cloud of white dust.

Sam was in and peeled off to the left of the room as Teal'c peeled off to the right, before she realised that the Goa'uld was watching them.

He sat on the desk at the back of the room, his knee hooked over the corner, swinging his foot like a man who had all day. Perhaps he did.

As he lifted the weapon he held in his hand and pointed it at Teal'c, the scientist in her once again absently noted the excess energy of the discharge as it formed the electric blue sine waveform around the central blast. The friend in her winced in sympathy and pain as Teal'c collapsed to the floor. The soldier in her lifted her gun, even as the zat moved through the arc towards the Colonel.

The zat discharged, even as she fired on him. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the Colonel collapse, but had no time to attend to him as her P-90 chattered. Around Michael Stambaugh, the surface of the personal body shield coruscated gold and white, and she saw the ruby gleam in the palm of his hand and the glint of the ribbon device wound around his left hand, even as his right aimed the zat at her.

Zatfire earthed itself in the partition behind her as she ducked, and she looked desperately for an escape. Common sense was telling her that she couldn't go up against him armed with only a P-90. Not when he had a zat gun and a personal force shield.

She needed more.

She didn't have it. Not here.

Sam needed an exit.

Two steps towards the entrance to the office, she realised that the entrance to the office ran in a direct line with the aisle. If she used that door, she would be presenting Stambaugh with a perfect shot on the way out.

She spun so hard on her heel that she nearly twisted her ankle. As it was, it gave her an uncomfortable twinge, and she winced. But nothing hurt when she put her weight down on her foot and she crouched down in worn loop pile carpet as her mind scuttled through alternatives.

There was no sound from Stambaugh - where was he? Sam wasn't sure whether she should risk taking a look, but if she didn't know what he was doing...

Automatic fear swamped her as Stambaugh stepped over the Colonel's arm and into the gap between the rows of desks. Her military training cried, Run! Her scientific side said, Wait!

The zat was pointed directly at her. One shot and she'd be down like the Colonel and Teal'c. Two shots and she'd be toast. She was trapped. Nowhere to run, nowhere to go. No useful weaponry, no backup.

If she'd been the type to swear, she'd have sworn.

A quick glance at her surroundings showed her no feasible way to get out of his line of sight before he could shoot her. One side of the office was a window with the balcony. The SWAT captain had been thrown off that balcony to his death; there was no escape there. The other side of the office was a frosted glass window that ran along the width of the building and led to external restrooms.

But just because escape wasn't possible didn't mean other options weren't available. Possibilities sprang up, twisting and writhing in permutations that adjusted to provide a solution as soon as a problem was presented.

It was exactly like picking a lock with tumblers; work through the problems one by one until each one was matched and the lock lay open.

Unaware of her thoughts, the Goa'uld spoke, no longer bothering to disguise its voice. "My host was in doubt that you would come, Major. The prejudice of your kind against the female gender has always been both help and hindrance."

She could shoot and run now. But curiosity held her back. Daniel held the opinion that information was power, just as much as a firearm, if not more. "Why?"

"My host has a personal grievance with Jack for the destruction of his marriage; however, I have a personal grievance with you." It smiled.

Sam's mind worked frantically, trying to think of any Goa'uld she might have pissed off recently - or not so recently. As her mind flickered in and out of her memories, she slowly changed the angle of her gun so it pointed towards the ceiling, while keeping her hand on the trigger. To Stambaugh, it would hopefully look like she was just slacking off her grip, and he wouldn't think anything of it...

Then Teal'c rose up from between the desks on the other side of the room, a dark fury that lunged for Stambaugh. His attack provided the perfect distraction for the Goa'uld.

As it turned, Sam took the opportunity to fire upwards, at the plastic light cover above the Goa'uld. The falling shards did what she'd planned for them to do; distract the Goa'uld enough to give her a few precious seconds to make her escape and get the help she needed.

The chatter of her P-90 seemed louder than anything else except the drumbeat of her blood running through her veins. Glass shattered, cracks webbed out from the holes in the glass partition, and the toes of her boots dug into the carpet as she ran for the weakened glass pane and crashed through.

She let her shoulder take the brunt of the impact, and rolled down and over. A zat blast hit the upper edge of the hole she'd made, and she sprang to her feet and sprinted for the stairwell, her boots pounding against the carpet-covered concrete of the floor. Just before she reached the stairwell, instinct made her jerk to the left, away from the fire exit door.

Ozone crackled around her as the zat blast missed its target and earthed itself harmlessly into the wall. Then she shoved the fire door open and headed up to the roof.

Five flights, six flights, seven flights... She lost count of how many stairs she'd climbed, so the door to the roof was a surprise when she reached it. Outside the sun was bright and hot, and it clearly illuminated the face of the man coming towards her.

Which part of 'no' did you not understand, Detective?

"Sam? You're okay?" Pete made to touch her, but she evaded him.

"I'm fine." Now that she was up here, she had only one goal; get back down there and help her team-mates. As she strode over to the second box Daniel had sent up to them, she unclipped her P-90 and flipped the safety catch on. Her firearm would be of no use against Stambaugh.

"Where are the Colonel and Teal'c?"

"Stambaugh has him. Hold this." Sam handed him the P-90 and he took it.

"He's a Goa'uld, isn't he?"

"Yes," she answered shortly. The second box was a suitcase with an electronic lock combination. The lock combination was input and she opened the lid.

Fight fire with fire.

The graceful elegance of a ribbon device gleamed up at her from its foam padded resting place. Inside, a hot, raging fury was beginning to burn as she pushed up her sleeve and fitted the ribbon device over her hand. Her fingers slipped neatly into the fingertips of the device, adjusting the chains that linked the fingertips to the device on the palm and the spiralling ribbon of metal up her arm.

Her body tingled, the naquadah in her bloodstream reacting to the naquadah compound in the ribbon device. It was her gift and her curse, this ability to use the Goa'uld devices, and she both loved and feared it. But it had come in handy before and it would again.

Someone stood in her light, and she looked up.

Pete jerked back. "Isn't... Wasn't the woman at Daniel's house...?"

With a sudden pang, Sam recalled that his authorisation to know about the project hadn't included authorisation to know about her possession by Jolinar. "She was wearing it."

He couldn't hide the naked fear that chased across his face. "But you, you're not..." He took an automatic step back as she flexed her fingers around the crystal in the centre of her palm.

"No, I'm not," she said evenly, refusing to let him see how much his distaste disturbed her. "But I can."

And then she was up and headed back towards the stairwell.

"Wait, Sam! You can't just..."

She turned on him, and he stopped dead. "I can just," she told him quietly. "And I will just." Anger and a little resentment bubbled inside her, and she closed her hand into a fist. The ribbon device was most powerful in the application of emotion, channelled through the user's will. She wasn't entirely sure she was capable of controlling what was inside her right now, but she was determined to end this, here and now. And, as Pete regarded her, more than a little nervously, Sam guessed that the sheer grimness of her determination was frightening to her boyfriend, who'd never seen this side of her before, after all.

The Colonel's words rang in her head. You keep that part of yourself separate from them, and you deal.

"Sam..."

"You've already ignored more requests and disobeyed more orders than I want to count, Detective Shanahan," she said, choosing to use her persona of the military Major. "So I'm not going to tell you what to do; just what not to do." She lifted her gloved and fisted hand and felt a twinge of shameful pleasure at his fear. "Don't get in my way."

The Colonel was still down there, and in her absence, Stambaugh's Goa'uld would take its frustrations out on him. Major Sam Carter couldn't afford that.

"You don't have to do this - the SWATs are coming in..."

She saw the black-suited figures, dropping out of the helicopters hovering over the building next door. Send in the clowns, Daniel had said, half-joking, half-serious. All she did was repeat her warning, "Don't get in my way, Detective." The formality helped. This was a professional situation, and she was a professional soldier. That he didn't understand her as 'Major Carter' wasn't her problem.

Her team needed her to be 'Major Carter' and for them she would do what she had to do.

The stairwell door closed shut behind her, effectively cutting off the question of who was going to follow her. Without either the key or a set of lock-picks, neither Pete, nor the SWATs would be able to easily come after her.

Which suited Sam just fine.

The hard concrete beneath her boots was the harsh cold of her resolve, a solid, immoveable centre in the core of her being. The cold of the air of the stairwell permeated her will, freezing it in ice. Even the once air-conditioned corridors of the office seemed warm as she walked through them, on her way to confront Stambaugh and the Goa'uld that possessed him.

Sam paused as she approached the door to the first office, however a quick glance showed nobody there.

The door to the second office was slightly ajar, giving Sam an aural insight into the room, even if she couldn't actually see into the place.

It sounded bad.

Someone was breathing heavily, his inhalations laboured and slow. As Sam drew near, she winced as hard metal battered soft flesh with a meaty thump.

"So, Jack? Did Mary lie?"

The voice was human, not Goa'uld, and it resonated with hatred as something squelched unpleasantly. The Colonel gave a muffled moan of agony.

"Did you fuck my wife, Jack?" Michael Stambaugh asked, brutal with both his words and his fists. "I can't seem to hear you..."

Sam heard the crack of bone against bone, and the Colonel grunted. The sound was choked, as if even the voicing of pain was an agony that required outlet.

Stambaugh - or the Goa'uld that controlled hm - was torturing the Colonel, and taking pleasure in the act.

The thought ignited a rage within her, boiling swiftly. The rage was born of her frustration with the sneers and doubts she'd felt upon her through the day. It swept forth from deep within her soul, obliterating the barriers she set upon herself, the control she prized so dearly, and the restraint she usually practised.

All of it, gone in an instant.

And as her rage met the cold ice of her will, the pressure built within her, like steam in a kettle, like the coiled power of a spring.

Then it burst and the torrent swept her away.

----

Carter had come back.

It was something to focus on other than the pain that seared up his thigh, other than the piercing agony of breathing. He thought a rib might be cracked.

Jack had endured a lot of pain in his life; this was just one more to add to the collection. It never stopped hurting, though.

And she never ceased to amaze him - or terrify him.

Stambaugh's Goa'uld didn't have a chance. The instant he saw Carter, the ribbon device wrapped around her hand, Jack knew the Goa'uld was dead. The Goa'uld just didn't know it yet. Carter was unforgiving of herself and of her enemies when roused.

The creature looked up and raised its own device - but in defence, not in attack. Jack had a moment to feel surprise, before pain exploded in his leg. Stambaugh's Goa'uld had dug its fingers into his injured thigh. He bit his teeth down and ground them together, trying to control the noises that threatened to escape from his throat. Never let them see they get to you.

He heard the ripple of power that threw the Goa'uld back. He felt the Goa'uld's fingers dig into his already-wounded leg, and yelped before he could shut his mouth. His nerves were afire with agony, strong as pleasure, pure as pain; but beneath it all, he could feel tendrils of fear curling around his heaving chest with inexorable ice.

Carter had thrown the Goa'uld halfway across the room, and her expression was a mask of brittle fury, cracking around the edges of what little composure remained. Blue eyes bored into the Goa'uld's eyes, as though daring it to challenge her, to come up against her and be destroyed.

He'd always feared this part of Carter. She was beautiful and amazing, and yet terrible and fearsome; partly for being the woman she was, and partly for being what Jolinar had made her with two days of possession.

Jack trusted her, without a doubt. Whatever Jolinar had done to her, the creature was no longer in her. She'd asked terrible things of him, and he'd asked terrible things of her; and Jack could see little that might change that in the future. But that trust made her no less terrifying when she moved out of the role of the soldier Jack knew and began to be a soldier whose mind he didn't know.

She only spared a moment to meet his gaze with quick concern before she stepped over him and continued on to the Goa'uld. Jack understood the logic of her action; the enemy must be defeated before the wounded could be seen to; but a part of him yelled, 'Get me the fucking hell out of here!'

The Goa'uld said something to her, perhaps trying to plea-bargain.

Carter had no mercy on him.

Jack heard and felt the reverberative shockwaves of her action rather than saw them. There was a sickening crack, the sound of bone and flesh giving way beneath concussive force.

The gasp from the door came from not one mouth but many.

Five pairs of eyes stared at Carter, varying degrees of horror and loathing in their eyes: four SWAT personnel, geared up, armoured, and weaponed; and one police detective, half-crouched in the corridor, looking at his girlfriend in shock.

"Holy shit!"

It was nothing more than a whisper, but Carter heard it, and whirled on her heel. Her eyes were nearly black, the iris swallowed up by the pupil. Jack felt another frisson of fear. This time the terror was not of Carter, but for Carter.

Something had snapped within her, whether the stresses of having her professional capabilities doubted, or the use of so much power in the ribbon device, or something else, Jack didn't know. What he did know was that anything that might antagonise her right now was not a good idea. She was teetering on the brink, but not over the edge. Not yet.

Until one of the SWATs raised his gun.

The man was in shock. He'd come to deal with a man who'd killed one of his colleagues, and found himself facing an Air Force Major who wasn't fully in her right mind. He did the worst possible thing he could have done.

He raised his gun to take out the perceived threat to himself and his team.

"Don't!"

The cry wasn't Jack's.

Shanahan had seen the gun rise and slammed the muzzle away even as the man fired at Carter.

Jack's nape prickled as he felt the personal shield assert itself from the ribbon device. Each bullet produced its own net of concentric circles against the background of the gold against it, before it rebounded back with equal force, causing the SWATs to yelp and duck as the bullets came back at them.

He felt a sudden, sharp pain in his thigh as at least one of the rebounds embedded itself in the muscle there, but Jack was watching Carter. Her hand rose and the force from the ribbon device rippled out over his body and into the bodies of the men she perceived as a threat to her.

Bodies slammed against the partition wall between the two work areas. Men cried out as they were flung back like rag dolls to land in the office beyond. Shanahan crumpled against the wall, struggling to hold back fear and a wince of agony.

Carter lifted the ribbon device again.

Her next blow would kill. And this time, the death would not be a Goa'uld and his half-crazed host, but men whose chiefest mistake had been to underestimate her.

Death was a hard price to pay for ignorance and idiocy. And Carter didn't deserve that weight on her soul.

Jack opened his mouth to speak.

"Major Carter, you do not wish to do this." Teal'c's words rang through the room, hoarse and spoken with effort.

She shuddered, but her hand didn't lower from its raised position.

Teal'c repeated his entreaty. "Major Carter."

Jack ignored the splintering misery of his leg. He blocked out the body-jarring-pain of his cracked ribs, the slow-growing burning in his stomach. He took a slow, deep breath, holding it against his body's painful betrayal, and said the only thing he could think of to say.

"Hey, Dorothy."

Her head jerked down to look at him, and he met her gaze and saw the madness there. He didn't flinch back from it. Jack knew where she was; he'd been there himself and it was a dark, terrible place. But he'd come back. She'd come back once before. She could do it again.

"Sam." The appeal was personal and they both knew it. He never used her name these days, having long ago trained and taught himself to think of her as Carter. Still, this time, she needed to know he saw her as a person and not as a soldier. She needed to be reminded of who she was.

And she was reminded. Jack's insides unclenched a little as her hand dropped down to her side and her gaze focused on him, blue eyes wide with horror.

As he met her eyes, pain suddenly regained its hold on his senses. His body was on fire, the nerves screaming for a relief that they weren't getting. The world spun around him, and Carter with it. Jack shut his eyes as nausea rose. If he spewed now, he'd choke on his own vomit

When he opened his eyes a moment later, she was on her knees beside him, doing something that he couldn't see. As he tried to lift his head, his ribs protested and his abdomen howled. Her hand eased his pain-frozen shoulder down, the metallic fingers of the ribbon device pressing into his flesh in gentle warning. "Don't move, sir."

She sounded subdued.

There was nobody else in the room, he realised. Just them. He must have fallen unconscious from blood loss or something. He tried to catch her eyes, but she refused to meet his gaze. Instead, she kept her focus on his leg as she slipped something under his thigh and tied it off. Jack winced as the pressure prompted a bundle of nerves to protest, but managed, "Where...is...everyone?"

"Teal'c's called Daniel. He's sending in a medical team to see to you, and a team to pick up the body and get it back to Cheyenne."

Jack tried to glance over at where the SWAT team members had been, but she answered his question before he even asked it. "Teal'c and Pete persuaded them not to arrest me. They're being taken down to get checked out."

She was definitely subdued, without her usual ebullience.

"Carter."

Her body stiffened, as though she were facing a blow, but her eyes slid to his and held them, bravely.

She'd always had an expressive face, and Jack had learned to read it over the years. Every smile, every look, the way she tilted her face or angled her head as she worked; it all had meaning. And while Jack O'Neill might not be much good at languages, he did know how to interpret Sam Carter. He'd had seven years of near-daily practise.

She was having the most trouble with the guilt, he surmised. She'd come very close to totally losing it, and only her team-mates' intervention had stopped her from adding several more deaths to the one she already had on her hands. Carter controlled herself - sometimes too much so. Losing it would be utterly unacceptable in any case. Losing it in such a way that endangered the lives of others...

It would be a long time before Carter forgave herself.

He didn't have the words, because Jack O'Neill was not a man of many words.

She was Carter, and she would always be Carter to him. No matter what.

He moved his fingers enough to touch the back of her hand. The skin beneath his fingers was soft, and the touch was more of a caress. Jack didn't know if she'd respond; Carter had always been irregular that way, sometimes she'd respond, sometimes she wouldn't.

This time, she did.

Slowly, her cold fingers slipped into his warm ones and curled tight, seeking and giving reassurance. And Jack held her hand until the medical teams came to take him away.

End of Part Seven